He was a mathematician, lawyer, man of letters and librarian – as well as a con man, gambler and liar – whose professional and personal urgings took him across Europe, where he met many of the great men of the age. Casanova was more than just a libido, however. Casanova’s get-out clause was that he believed women were entitled to pleasure too and, what’s more, he was almost permanently in love. Not all the bedpost notches that Casanova recounted in his own version of his career, Histoire de ma vie, were fully consensual: there were plenty of willing wives but also pre-teen girls, girls prostituted by their parents, mother-and-daughter threesomes and, in one case, his own daughter. Giacomo Casanova (1725-98), the great seducer, may be a fascinating historical figure but, notes his latest biographer Leo Damrosch, his story “is often disturbing and sometimes very dark”. Libertinage is, in contemporary parlance, problematic.

Science and Technical Research and DevelopmentĬlose Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova by Leo Damrosch.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Yet with income inequality rising, the threat from North Korea growing and a divisive new president in Seoul, a bright future is by no means assured. He chronicles the rise and fall of authoritarian rule, the origins of the chaebol (literally “wealth clan”), industrial conglomerates and the “Korean Wave” that has won the country’s movies and K-Pop music international acclaim.

Pacheco Pardo, a professor of international relations, declares his love for South Korea, weaving his personal recollections (and travel tips) into the narrative. But the author argues that South Korea has long since outgrown this depiction and now deserves to be seen as a “whale” in its own right. The title invokes the old saying that Korea is a “shrimp between whales”, forever in danger of being crushed between the world’s great powers. Or so the legend goes.” Ramon Pacheco Pardo begins his engaging account with a sweeping history of the ancient kingdoms and warring empires that once ruled the Korean peninsula before it was divided in 1945, and the modern states of North and South Korea founded in 1948. Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop by Ramon Pacheco Pardo

Hanna bervoets books